Things to do in London this weekend

Another hotly anticipated FIFA World Cup is here, along with all the thrills, spills, soaring highs and beer-soaked disappointments it brings. This year, 16 stadiums across Canada, Mexico and the United States will host this epic tournament, which plays out until Sunday July 19 2026.

England’s final group game is a Saturday night show-down with Panama kicking off at 10pm BST, before the knock-out stage of the tournament starts on Sunday night. Practically every pub and bar in London will be getting in on the action and vying for your attendance during the World Cup’s biggest games. However, we’ve whittled it down to the places that offer the best atmosphere and the best view of the screen, wherever you station yourself.

Frida Kahlo’s brought the sun to London. Tate Modern has sold more advance tickets for Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon than for any exhibition in the Tate gallery’s 128-year history. And it’s not surprising. 

This exhibition sets out to show how Frida became one of the most recognisable artists of the 20th century and a source of inspiration for generations of artists who followed. Alongside 23 paintings and 11 works on paper by Kahlo, there are photographs she sat for, her jewellery, a selection of Indigenous Mexican clothing from Kahlo’s wardrobe, and an excerpt from a film by Nikolas Muray capturing a tender moment between Frida and Diego.

And then there are several galleries devoted to documenting ‘Fridamania’: the shrines, sacred hearts and handcrafted tributes that transformed Kahlo from artist into folk hero before turning her into a global brand.

More than seventy years after her death at the age of 47, the Mexican artist remains a cultural phenomenon: a painter, fashion muse, feminist icon and, as the gift shop attests, a patron saint of tote bags and tea towels. Expect it to be busy!

BST is back for its thirteenth edition starting this Saturday, bringing some of the world’s biggest pop stars to Hyde Park for over the next few weekends. The line-up is as eclectic as as ever in 2026; Saturday sees legendary country singer Garth Brooks headline, in his only European performance in 2026, with support from the Zac Brown Band and Ashley McBryde, while South Korean boyband Ateez take the headline slot on Sunday, accompanied by American singer Bazzi and girlband Flo.

And if you’re up for some spontaneous plans, you can still grab general release tickets for both days, starting at £59.05 for Ateez and £124.95 for Garth Brooks. 

The Barbican is shining a spotlight on Pan-Africanism in contemporary art, cinema, music and performance in this summer-long creative series, which will feature more than 30 events as well as an art exhibition. Coined in the early 1900s, the umbrella term Pan-Africanism encompasses political and philosophical movements advocating for self-determination, anti-colonial resistance and transnational solidarity among peoples of African descent. Highlights include the central exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica with 300 works, including paintings, installations, posters, journals and film. Look out for Carnival dance workshops, Carnival costume-making workshops, late-night parties and live music performances, too. 

First there were the hit TV thrillers: Borgen, Wallander and The Killing. Then came the movies: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, In Order Of Disappearance and the sublimely twisted Headhunters. Then the Scandi noir wave kinda petered out, with a Hollywood brain drain drawing a line under these blackly funny, bleakly violent and deviously plotted studies of humans deep in the shit. 

Thankfully, Danish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen and his on-screen muse Mads Mikkelsen seem hellbent on reanimating the genre Their latest and most leftfield team-up sees the pair hang an endearingly offbeat exploration of men’s mental health on the framework of a crime thriller. 

Riders of Justice’s Nikolaj Lie Kaas is Anker, a brooding bank robber with major anger issues. Fresh from prison, he’s got the weekend to find out where his mentally unwell brother Manfred (Mikkelsen) buried the loot before local gangster Flemming (Nicolas Bro) starts chopping off body parts.

Warmth, empathy and severed fingers in the same film? Scandi noir is back. 

Fresh from the crowds of West End Live, 'All That West End' is taking over HERE at Outernet for an afternoon of musical theatre anthems, live performances and big theatre-kid energy.

Leading the bill is Rachel Tucker, the acclaimed West End star known for standout roles in Wicked, Hadestown, Come From Away and Sunset Boulevard. Alongside live performances and DJs, expect a soundtrack packed with Broadway classics, modern musical favourites and plenty of opportunities for a full-throated singalong.

If you're not quite ready for the curtain to come down after West End Live, this lively Soho afterparty keeps the celebrations going well into the evening.

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Hiding in plain sight, you’ll find the demure Camille on the very edge of Borough Market. It’s a small, pretty place. There are a handful of tables outside, and a chic burgundy and primrose colour scheme within. It doesn’t shout about its elegance, but rather whispers it seductively into your ear. Opened a couple of years back by the same team behind Soho’s Ducksoup, this French bistro immediately blew its forebear out of the water thanks to the skill and tenacity of head chef Elliot Hashtroudi. He’s not French himself, but is committed to the full-throttle nature of the country’s rustic, earthy cuisine. A case in point; offal. You’ll find cocks comb schnitzel and snout cassoulet on the menu, and both are sublime. For the less adventurous, there is still a world of wonder here. The tartare is one of the best we’ve had, and rosy slices of onglet are topped with Pevensey blue cheese. It’s a triumph of imagination, talent, and guts.

Take a look beyond the surface of London with the London Festival of Architecture, and you'll discover the planners, designers, and ideas that have shaped our streets. This year's theme is 'Belonging', which means there's a focus on community, and how we care for the spaces we live in. There are over 400 events on the line-up, including guided walks, exhibitions, talks, installations and performances. For the first time, The London Centre in Guildhall will act as the festival's central hub, hosting talks and performances, a Lego challenge (Sat June 20), and a TfL bus display exhibition. 

Harry Styles’ Together, Together world tour in London is well underway. Three years since his record-breaking Love on Tour, fans have been waiting patiently for another chance to see the pop star leaping, running and bopping across stadium stages. Harry’s run of dates at Wembley began on Friday June 12 and will run through to Saturday July 4.

The mammoth tour follows the release of Harry’s fourth studio album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally and it’ll see him doing a run of residencies in seven different cities. London is the second city on the tour, following a 10-date run by Harry in Amsterdam. He’s at Wembley Stadium for a whopping 12 dates, meaning the residency is just past the halfway point. 

Thinking of getting tickets in the eleventh hour? There are still some left up for grabs on Ticketmaster for most of Harry’s Wembley shows. Find them here. And if those get all snapped up, you can find resale tickets over on Viagogo or StubHub, from around £50. 

🎟️ Find a full guide to where (and how) to buy last-minute Harry Styles tickets in London here. 

Faithfully capturing the simple joys and craziness of the beloved 1980s TV cartoon, the Masters of the Universe story starts in Eternia, a beautiful, fairytale fantasy. Here, sensitive little Prince Adam is told to ‘be a man’ by his father who forces him into combat training. When the family are attacked by the evil Skeletor, Adam is sent to Earth via an intergalactic rainbow highway (very Thor). Adam gets a Clark Kent-type job in HR before retrieving his magical sword and going back to fight for Eternia. After decades in development hell, Masters of the Universe finally fell into the right hands with Bumblebee director Travis Knight. Where other reboots lean into dour origin stories, his is as brightly coloured as a bowl of e-numbered breakfast cereal. It features many of its fan-favourite, straight-out-the-toybox battle characters and best of all is the epic rock/synth score by British composer Daniel Pemberton. 

The National Theatre has brought back 2007’s blockbuster War Horse, a show that closed on the West End in 2016 but has lived on via endless tours and a Stephen Spielberg-directed screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s source text. It’s still incredible. Number one, the puppets are astonishing. Number two: sure, it’s a reasonably trope-filled story about the First World War, adapted by Nick Stafford from Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 book with a plot that revolves around the doomed British cavalry who discovered they were obsolete in the worst way possible during the early weeks of the conflict. It’s sturdy, unfussy storytelling, but this gives it a purity and timelessness.  The years haven’t touched War Horse, and short of a radical rethink of our attitude to WW1 or, puppets, it’s hard to imagine why it would ever age. 

South London’s beloved anthropological museum is going big with the birthday celebrations this year. To mark its 125th anniversary, the Horniman is hosting a series of fun-packed, family-friendly events completely free of charge this June. 

Visitors can flock between three stages hosting local and young musicians, DJs and musical storytelling for youngsters, as well as taking part in craft sessions including birthday hat and hedgehog highway sign-making sessions. 

Guests can also partake in a variety of interactive trails and tours, including birdspotting and a recently added AR ‘Animals Everywhere’ trail, which allows you to interact with a series of 3D-animated creatures around the museum, including the Horniman’s most iconic resident, the overstuffed walrus. Prefer IRL interactions? Make a beeline for the Butterfly House, which is offering reduced-cost tickets for the weekend, or get hands-on at the Handling Collection. 

There’ll also be all the usual street food stalls and bars that you may have seen at the Horniman’s regular spring fairs and late openings, so you can fuel up after a busy day of activities. Tickets are free but are being snapped up fast – grab yours  here before they’re gone!

This intense debut play from Georgie Dettmer is a vignette-based style of drama, and it’s not apparent for the first third or so that it’s a play that will actually cohere. Its cluster of storylines about the intersection of web-age voyeurism, female sexuality and male violence are compelling but there’s a nagging worry that it’s going to be tricky to pay all this stuff off at the end. But, it does and, moreover, it has an implacable momentum twinned with immaculately icy production from director Jess Edwards. Amidst a barrage of scenes that run the gamut from a Hollywood star aghast at deepfakes to a frustrated mother being schooled by the police on what sort of information she should put out about her missing daughter, there’s a central plot of sorts. It concerns the horrifying case of Gisele Pelicot, the French woman whose husband drugged her and, over several years, invited dozens of men to rape her while asleep, something he filmed and photographed – which is what eventually led to his discovery. It’s a terrific debut play, wonderfully directed, and with a great, hard-working cast. As disturbing an hour of theatre as you’ll see on the London stage.

High Society is, of course, a pure joy, the stage incarnation of a ludicrously frothy Golden Age Cole Porter musical that has a plot you could blow over with a feather, plus some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century. ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, ‘I Love Paris in the Springtime’, ‘Well Did You Evah’, ‘Let’s Misbehave’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – the banger level is off the chart. With songs as good as these and a cast just as good to match them, you’re in for a very nice evening at the theatre. 

Is it art, or is it maths? It’s a question even MC Escher himself couldn’t answer about his own work. While the Dutch printmaker known for his infinite staircases, metamorphosing tessellations and paradoxical buildings was rejected by the art world, he was revered by mathematicians and is now one of the most famous optical illusionists of all time. The OG creator of images that make you go ‘Huh?’ is going under the microscope in London with a blockbuster exhibition celebrating his life and work this summer. Created by Italian company Arthemisia and the immersive peeps at Fever, MC Escher: The Exhibition has arrived at Somerset House as part of its world tour. If you are a gaga for geometry, are fascinated by fractals, or just have a penchant for the psychedelic, you will find plenty to be engrossed by here. 

Aussie singer-songwriter Eddie Perfect’s all-singing take on the 1988 Tim Burton classic is very definitely a retelling, taking most of the core elements of the supernatural comedy and positioning them together in a very different, very ’20s musical theatre way. Alex Timbers’ production was a big Broadway hit. Here, David Fynn’s Betelgeuse is a mischievous spirit with foreknowledge of the imminent deaths of Barbara and Adam Maitland, whose house he’s been haunting (or at least lurking in) for some years. He’s the lead character from the off, greeting us with an onslaught of meta-wisecracks and iffy pop cultural references as he outlines the beginnings of his very convoluted scheme to gain a foothold in the human world via Lydia Deetz, the daughter of the family that buys the house after the Maitlands croak it. It has nice sets, nice ballads and if you like aggressively knowing 21st century Broadway humour, you’ll have fun.

One of Peter Shaffer’s most fondly remembered works is 1965’s Black Comedy, a throwaway one-act drawing room farce designed with astoundingly virtuosic precision, like a gaudy Christmas cracker that turns out to have a Fabergé egg inside. In it, skint artist Brindsley Miller tries to play off his ex, his fiancé, his neighbours, his fiancé’s dad and a guy from the electricity board as he frantically attempts to get his flat ready to impress a visiting German millionaire in the middle of a power cut. Shaffer’s audacious innovation is to reverse the lighting cues, so that when the lights in Brindsley’s flat are on, we’re plunged into total darkness, and when the lights are off, the theatre is brightly lit but the characters in the play can’t see anything. If it was significantly longer, it might run out of steam. But at one 90-minute act it’s damn near immaculate.

Works by Yung Lean, 070 Shake, Foals’ Yannis Philippakis and Charlize Theron will all be featured in this audiovisual exhibition at 180 Studios, created by film director Romain Gavras and producer Surkin (also know as Gener8ion). Visions of 2034 will display seven new and previously unseen short films, alongside an immersive installation and unseen Gener8ion footage and visuals. The immersive space will take visitors to a fictional world of 2034, where ‘hundreds of skittish and charasmatic’ characters will be waiting to greet them as they explore the works celebrating music, art, cinema and choreography. 

In our age of mind-boggling CGI and AI-optimised everything, it’s easy to forget how much pleasure can be had from the simple optical tricks of mirrors and lights. But not for Julio Le Parc. A key figure of the Kinetic and Op Art movements of the 1960s, the pioneering Argentinian artist has been making illuminated, kinetic and participatory works for seven decades, and is still making art at the ripe old age of 97. This major retrospective celebrates his visionary seven-decade career, spanning from from his arrival in Paris in the late 1950s to his resurgence in the 2010s, with over 60 colourful, immersive (and extremely Instagrammable) works.

As one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century, Barbara Hepworth made stunning modern creations inspired by the nature and lanscapes of Cornwall, where she lived. Her abstract shapes often featured smooth ovals, holes, undulating surfaces and strings. This summer the Courtauld will stage an exhibition interested in one aspect of Hepworth’s practice: her obsession with colour, which often came up in her work in unexpected ways. Featuring 20 of her most significant sculptures, alongside 30 drawings, Hepworth in Colour will unite for the first time her early innovative sculptures with colour of the 1940s with major examples of her work with colour from the 1950s and 1960s.

Mexican architecture firm LANZA atelier has been chosen to design this 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, which features a ‘crinkle-crankle’ wall. Traditional structures seen in English architecture from the 18th century, these wavy partitions temper climate, create shelter, and are ideal for growing fruit. And fittingly, they’re also known as serpentine walls. The prestigious architectural commission celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, with a landmark series of talks programmed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation. 

There’s something irresistably fascinating about seeing into artist’s studios – messy materials, stacks of canvases, and a peek behind the curtain into the work spaces for some of the world’s best creative minds. To coincide with the Courtauld’s major Barbara Hepworth exhibition, the gallery is running a companion show of photographs taken by Paul Laib offering a look inside Hepworth’s London studio that she shared with Ben Nicholson in the 1930s. 

After pulling in millions of visitors in Amsterdam and Barcelona, Moco Museum London has landed beside Marble Arch with a three-floor showcase of modern, contemporary and immersive art. Inside, you’ll find more than 100 works from names including Banksy, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Yayoi Kusama, alongside immersive digital rooms and sensory installations designed to pull you into the artwork. There’s also the limited-run exhibition ‘Voice of the Street’, dedicated to Haring’s legendary New York subway drawings from the early 1980s. Flex-entry tickets start from £15, so you can drop in whenever suits during opening hours.

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Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £23.60!

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Broadwick Soho arrived with serious flair in 2023 and has been serving up a hit of West End glamour, that feels both indulgent and effortlessly cool ever since. Tucked inside the hotel, Dear Jackie is its seductive Italian dining room, all Murano glow, red silk walls and plush booths that could tell a few stories. The menu leans into refined Italian comfort with superior pasta and reimagined classics, making it an ideal spot to settle in for dinner.

With this exclusive Time Out offer, you can sink into Soho’s newest slice of dolce vita decadence for less with a three courses set meun and a glass of Champagne (worth £22). The perfect pre-theatre treat or the start of a night that might run on far longer than planned.

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The National Portrait Gallery’s summer 2026 exhibition is turning the spotlight on one of the twentieth century’s biggest icons. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait will be a real blockbuster, exploring the legacy of one of Hollywood’s most alluring figures through works by some of the twentieth century’s greatest artists and photographers, including Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton, Marlene Dumas, Milton Greene and Eve Arnold. 

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The first major European exhibition of James McNeil Whistler’s work in 30 years arrives at Tate Britain in 2026. Known as a truly global artist, The Victorian oil painter re-wrote many of the rules of art, and was an early adopter of ’art for art’s sake’. The retrospective brings together the artist’s world-famous paintings such as ‘Whistler’s Mother’ (Mr Bean fans will recognise this one, IYKYK) alongside rarely, or never seen, works. It includes exquisite portraits, drawings, prints, and designs, from as early as his teens in St Petersburg to the enigmatic late self-portraits.